A500 potential

[Tricky]

I have thought about using HAM mode as part of a 3D engine, where the "hold" effect is used to fill the polygons without needing to use the blitter (except for the outlines).  Essentially if you fill the whole screen with the value that holds, for instance, the blue value, you'd only need to draw the edges to get any red/green/yellow polygon instantly with the hardware.

I haven't thought about it too hard, but I reckon a super fast 3D engine in 4096 colours should be possible (not texture mapping, just plain faces).

[Tricky]

SamuraiCrow wrote:
@Tricky

That could work for Gourand shading, certainly, but I doubt it would be all that useful without texture mapping, considering that there is a high-color to HAM8 converter for the AGA chipset.

The idea is to take advantage of the fringing, rather than try to get rid of it.  If you fill the whole screen in the value that changes only the blue value of the RGB signal, and put a red pixel on the left side of the screen, and a black pixel to the right on the same scanline, what you will see will be a red line all the way from the red pixel to the black one.  Draw the outline of a polygon in such a way, and you don't need to waste any software time filling it in, as is the traditional way using the Blitter's polygon filling mode.  Drawing lines doesn't take much time, but filling large polygons does.  So you basically get solid vector graphics for the price of wireframe.

Also an A500 doesn't have a high-colour to Ham8 converter!

[Tricky]

@Waccoon

A simple primitive such as a cube or dodecahedron wouldn't be any problem to render anyway.  Just draw all the right-hand edges of the polygons first in black, then the left-hand edges in whatever colour the face should be (from the 16-colour base palette).

As long as you have no intersecting faces it should be fine.  It gets a bit more complex once you start trying to draw one polygon over the top of another.  But I'm sure there are ways round that.

I will get round to trying it out, one day...

[Tricky]

uncharted wrote:
The big problem with Workbench 1.x was that it looked like a toy.  While in theory the colours were a good choice (high contrasting), it looked silly.

This doesn't seem to hurt Windows XP!